Page 8 of Scoundrel for Sale
Abbie regarded Gabe in the candlelight.
She’d been wondering how he would react once he learned that she was the winner of the auction. While she had prepared herself for a range of possible responses, she’d allowed herself to hope his reaction would be positive, despite what had happened last time.
Last time being the four-day interval in which she had buried her brother, married a man she did not love, and moved out of the only home she had ever known, all while the only friend she had left in the world remained hell-bent on avoiding her.
When Gabe returned home with Hart’s body, Abbie had been a wreck. Her parents had died the previous month, and Gabe’s letter informing her of her brother’s death on the battlefield had beaten him to Hampshire by a mere two days. On the day Gabe arrived, she was still reeling from the news that instead of reuniting with her brother, she was going to bury him.
She hadn’t known what to expect from their meeting. Frankly, she hadn’t been thinking clearly enough to even form expectations. But she knew that Gabe was the only person on the face of this earth who had loved Hart as much as she had, and who felt his loss, as well as the loss of her parents, as deeply. She had assumed they would comfort one another.
When Gabe got out of the carriage, dusty from the road and deeply tan from years spent in the field, Abbie burst into tears. She came flying down the steps of Pennington House and threw her arms around his neck.
Or at least, she tried to. Instead of catching her in a hug and letting her cry on his shoulder, Gabe recoiled, all but scrambling back into the carriage.
Abbie quickly recalled that most men had a horror of weeping women. She’d known that, but in her defense, she had a host of other troubles on her mind.
Still, she understood Gabe’s reaction. But she didn’t appreciate the way he had recoiled after giving her his handkerchief. She hadn’t meant to brush his fingers, but her hands were trembling. The way he’d jerked back at the contact, you’d have thought she was stricken with some sort of plague.
The next four days were not an improvement. Instead of commiserating with Abbie, Gabe went straight to her uncle Edmund, the new earl. Uncle Edmund had five daughters of his own who now needed to be outfitted and dowered in a manner befitting the daughters of a peer. He immediately warmed to the idea of marrying Abbie off to the man chosen by her own brother. Lord Dulson, whose home was just two miles away, was promptly summoned. It came as little surprise to Abbie that Dulson, who had proposed on three previous occasions, was ready and willing to comply with her brother’s dying wish. When he offered to take Abbie without a dowry, her fate had been sealed.
Abbie tried to protest. As she had told Lord Dulson whilst declining his three previous proposals, she did not love him and felt certain that she never would. Besides, it was unbecoming for her to marry anyone so quickly upon the deaths of her parents and brother. Her uncle would hear none of it, so she attempted to appeal to Gabe. But Gabe spent the scant days he was there avoiding her, quitting any room she entered and excusing himself the second she attempted to engage him in conversation.
Meanwhile, her aunt and uncle spent their days lecturing Abbie, telling her what a bad sister she was for refusing her brother’s dying wish, that there would not be enough money to dower both her and her cousins, and what an unfeeling, selfish girl she was not to think of them.
In the end, marriage to a man she knew she would never love had seemed a better choice than life inside a house where she was unwanted, scorned, and constantly hounded. Seeing no alternative, two days after burying her brother, Abbie married Lord Dulson.
Gabe left as soon as the parish registry was signed, not even staying for the wedding breakfast.
None of that suggested that their next meeting would be on good terms.
But then, the strangest thing happened.
Six months later, feeling almost as lonely and forlorn as she had on her wedding day, Abbie found herself writing a letter to Gabe. It wasn’t a normal sort of letter. No, this was a mawkish, pour-your-heart-out sort of letter, full of all of the messy emotions he apparently couldn’t stand.
She hadn’t meant to post it. She’d thought it might be cathartic to write everything down and then throw those feelings into the fire. But she left it out on her desk, meaning to read it over one last time before destroying it, and a housemaid picked it up and placed it in the stack of outgoing correspondence. Her husband franked everything in the pile without looking to see what it was, and out into the world it had gone.
Abbie was horrified when she learned the letter had been posted. She spent the next few months in agony, wondering what Gabe must think of her and dreading his response, if she received one at all.
But when Gabe’s letter came… it was wonderful. He didn’t seem to mind her jumbled emotions; in fact, he confessed to feeling much the same way. Whereas everyone else kept telling her to bear up, to move on, Gabe told her that her grief was natural, that the fact that she loved her parents and brother so deeply was a mark of what a good person she was. He even apologized for his stilted behavior during his brief time in Hampshire, saying he knew he knew he had handled it in the worst manner imaginable.
Abbie wrote back at once. It was such a relief to finally have someone who understood. And so, she and Gabe struck up a correspondence, a correspondence that became Abbie’s lifeline. To be sure, Gabe’s letters weren’t what you would call cheerful. He was, after all, fighting in a war, as well as mourning the loss of his closest friend. But then, neither were hers. And more importantly, his letters were the one place she could express her honest feelings, where she could be sad or angry, where she didn’t have to put on a jolly face and pretend that everything was splendid when it wasn’t. Gabe wrote back confessing how lonely he felt without Hart, and how hard it was to maintain the stoic front expected of an army officer. And Abbie had the comfort of knowing that even if he was hundreds of miles away, at least someone out there understood.
After five years of exchanging such letters, Abbie felt closer to Gabe than she’d ever felt to anyone. And so she had allowed herself to entertain the hope that he might be happy to see her.
Of course, she’d known his reaction might not be positive. That he might still think of her as a child rather than a woman and balk at the prospect of making love to her. Or he might feel embarrassed that she’d seen him at such a low moment when he was forced to sell himself to the highest bidder.
Yet even though she had prepared herself for a negative reaction, the abject horror on his face…
It certainly wasn’t flattering.
She pasted on a smile. “Good evening, Gabe. So lovely to see you again.” She waited a beat for a reply, but he seemed to be at a complete loss. She peeled off her gloves. “May I have my drink? I suddenly feel as though I could use one.”
She reached for her glass, but when she was an inch from taking it, he jerked backward, bumping into the sideboard and spilling the remaining Madeira on his boots.
She sighed. So this was the way of it. The Gabe she’d come to know so well, the one who’d written her those wonderful letters, was gone. They were right back to where they’d been at Hart’s funeral.
“I’ll just pour another, shall I?” she said, reaching for her glass. Gabe set it down on the sideboard and scooted away with a rather uncomplimentary alacrity.
She was removing the stopper from the decanter when he blurted, “What are you doing here?”
